Factotum

35mm print! Jim Stark has graced MIFF as he has the American and world Indie film movement by producing movies by filmmakers from Jim Jarmusch to MIFF fave Semana Santa, from Mexico. But he really put a cast together with Matt Dillon, MIFF Midlife Achievement Award Honoree Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Fisher Stevens and MIFF bulwark Karen Young. “Charles Bukowski once said, ‘Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.’ As if to demonstrate this notion, we have Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and based on the misfit writer’s 1975 novel. Of course, craziness in a Bukowski book is all a matter of interpretation. As with Ken Kesey and Henry Miller, Bukowski’s craziness is really sanity–a rebel yell against the establishment. The true crazies in Bukowski’s universe are the people who run the show, the ones who live ordered, respectable lives. Bukowski is essentially a comic writer; his lead characters have no other agenda except to drink and write. He’s not out to reform anybody, least of all himself. Even sex is something of an afterthought in his semi-autobiographical novels. It gets him into trouble (which he likes), but it eats up valuable boozing and scribbling time (which he dislikes). In Factotum, Dillon plays Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter ego, and he captures something of Bukowski’s hangdog surliness. Most of Henry’s time away from bars is spent getting fired from mundane jobs at pickle factories and taxi companies…. Factotum is so sly and low-key hilarious that anybody can be in on the joke”—Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor.